Our September Book Pick Is … 2 Books! Curl Up With Literary Romcoms ‘Consider Yourself Kissed’ and ‘Loved One’

But both are ultimately novels about grief. In Aisha Muharrar’s Loved One, it’s obvious what the grief is about: It opens with Julia attending the funeral of her longtime best friend, Gabe, a musician who’s become reasonably famous throughout the decade they’ve known each other, then slipped in the shower, hit his head, and promptly died. In Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley, the causes for grief are multi-faceted and less immediate in the narrative (so I won’t spoil them for you), but are complicated by Coralie’s severe loneliness. (She’s recently moved from Australia to London, where she basically knows no one.)

Penguin Random House

Julia and Coralie are both interesting women; they are smart and kind and, when we meet them, still figuring out their footholds in the world of working adults. Muharrar and Stanley are upfront about their protagonists’ main flaws: Julia avoids thinking about the hard stuff, something grief exacerbates; Coralie hates her job, longs to write, puts it off, and never returns to it. But what elevates these novels beyond their romcom marketing is how these flaws play out—internally, and in relation to other characters. The full effect takes shape throughout both narratives, culminating in some juicy (if not entirely realistic) climaxes. 

Loved One revolves largely around Julia trying to get some of Gabe’s possessions back for his grieving mom, a quest that takes her to London and to Elizabeth, whom he was dating until a little over a month before his death. The two make an odd pair as they try to suss out the exact relationship the other had with Gabe over the course of a long weekend (while also subconsciously performing that same analysis on themselves). Beyond that, my lips are sealed.

Consider Yourself Kissed, on the other hand, unfolds over a decade, dipping into Coralie’s life progressing with Adam (the aforementioned divorced dad). The opening chapter shows her leaving their home and their children in a haze of despair and frustration, before jumping back nine years in the past. But that scene hangs over the novel until it comes back up, chronologically. Though Coralie’s struggles (motherhood, partnership, gender dynamics in a marriage, unfulfilling work, “having it all”) are a bit more prosaic among this genre of fiction, they don’t matter any less, and Stanley writes them extremely well, in emotionally provocative ways. (Get ready to be irritated at a fictional man for a solid couple hundred pages.)

With both of these novels, you will laugh, you will cry, you will roll your eyes at the protagonists. You might relate too painfully to some elements—like the running gag in Loved One about the inane things well-meaning people say when you’re grieving, or the characters’ inability to look away from the trainwreck that was Brexit coverage in Consider Yourself Kissed (I promise it’s more fun to read than it sounds)—but you won’t regret sitting down with these sweet, tender-hearted novels.

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